And the Beat goes on * * * Williams Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles General Publishing, 238 pages, $32.95 * * * The Letters Of William S. Burroughs 1945-1949 edited by Oliver Harris Viking, 472 pages, $33 * * * The Adding Machine: Selected E.
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| Title: | And the Beat goes on * * * Williams Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles General Publishing, 238 pages, $32.95 * * * The Letters Of William S. Burroughs 1945-1949 edited by Oliver Harris Viking, 472 pages, $33 * * * The Adding Machine: Selected E. |
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| Authors: | Douglas Fetherling |
| Source: | Toronto Star (Canada). 09/04/1993. |
| Abstract: | BARRY MILES, who published the first full biography of Allen Ginsberg several years ago, is a most astute British observer of American popular culture. In William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, he has achieved the neat feat of writing a short but incisive life of that well-documented but somehow elusive figure best known as the author of Naked Lunch. Considered as biography, this is a far superior book to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw: The Life And Times Of William S. Burroughs, which appeared in 1988 - more thoughtful, more artful, and bristling with ideas. The dry, laconic Burroughs, now 78, is a product of the same social stratum of St. Louis that produced the dry, laconic T.S. Eliot. Miles makes the case that though Burroughs's midwestern heritage gave him a streak of credulity (for years, he believed in Scientology and Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes), his lifelong struggle against it - and against the heroin addiction he chose as his act of rebellion - left him with some general ideas well worth examining. And not just isolated ideas (such as the notion that language evolved from a virus), but a complex web of thought about society's natural tendency to control the individual and the individual's duty to resist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
| Database: | Newspaper Source Plus |
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